Looking for a new linux distro | INFJ Forum

Looking for a new linux distro

Zero Angel

Zero Angel

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Dec 2, 2008
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Well, my disk with Ubuntu is starting to go, so I have set about ordering a new Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB hard drive.

Anyways, i'm not really liking Ubuntu Jaunty. It's still slow (like Ubuntu always was), firefox crawls and freezes often (on a dual-core with 4GB of RAM, this should not happen), the options to customize the interface are limited, and there are a few small things about GNOME that I otherwise have always disliked about it.

Anyways, i've been using linux since 2004 and my favorite OS had to have been Mandrake 10.1 and Kubuntu Fiesty (the version just prior to their changing over to KDE4). Anyways, i'm pretty good at doing stuff in the terminal and know some shell scripting and how to mess with most of the important config files in nano (not really interested in learning vi right now).

Can anyone recommend a good distro for me to try out? Someone recommended I try a BSD but I dont know if it supports all the linux apps i've grown to like. Any ideas?

Things I like:
Lots of interface customizability (like KDE3)
Package Management
speed
ease-of-maintainance
Good 3D acceleration and wine compatability
Elegant and low-key UI design (not plain, just not overdone)

Things I hate:
GNOME
Gentoo
Crudely put together repos
 
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I've been using Fedora on and off (mostly off), and I like it much better than Ubuntu. Yum is a much better package manager than apt, and the system just feels snappier. The only things I don't like about it are how you have to manually set up sudoers and the legally-blind fonts it's set up with by default.

It also comes with Gnome, but I'm sure you can get it with KDE just like practically any other distro. As much as I've tried, I can't stand KDE. XFCE has been my favorite desktop environment thus far.
 
I prefer both Fedora and Debian, but I'm working on (sporadically over the last three years) my own distro called "ShaiGarOS" which is a heavyweight OS with all the packages you'd want out of the box, so that it "Just Works".

It runs on GNOME, because I can't stand the sight of KDE. I grew up on Windows, so I prefer a more professional desktop to a kiddy desktop like Mac.

It'll also have drivers for just about every hardware you can think of, but at the moment, it's only got the drivers necessary for the computer it's being built on.

Gah. I need a team to work on this with me, so that I can get it done, with enough time that I'm updating all the drivers as they come out stable.

Currently it takes up 7gigs, but I'm hoping that this OS will be the first to need a Holographic data storage unit to install it. Either that or I'll have to sell it on ready prepared 1+TB Harddrives. I'd sell it simply because of the price of the harddrive. The plans are to take it up to about 80 gigs of space required for the OS and packages.

The interesting bit is that its menus won't be overloaded at all. You'll search for programs by tags, name, or browsing for them, and add whichever ones you want to the menu.
 
Thanks J, Fedora seems to meet a lot of the requirements I have, since responsiveness the most important one.

I'm also looking at arch-based distros, though I did build arch and tried kdemod last year, and didnt care for its KDEmod which was based on KDE 4.1. I used to have a portable linux distro called FaunOS (sadly, no longer maintained) which was arch-based, and even though it was running off of a 2.5 in portable drive, it was actually much more responsive than my native ubuntu install.

Deathjam said:
how about you make your own

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

and stop being so lazy
Click to expand...
I'd rather invest effort into doing something more worthwhile than building a linux distro, but thanks for the bad advice.
 
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Well, I installed Windows 7 not long after writing my last entry. I have to say that MS did a great job on that one, I found things on it which seemed to make computing a much smoother thing, I forgot about linux for a few weeks there as my two empty linux partitions just hung out not really doing anything.

So I decided to try a few things I wanted to try, archlinux and the new KDE4 desktop, I seemed to have found both of these in a distro called "Chakra Linux", which is basically the LinuxMint of Arch Linux (Arch requires you to start from the CLI, and install whatever services/DE/etc you want yourself via its easy-to-use package manager -- in this way you get a good handle on the way that it internally operates, but the things you learn from this can teach you things that can save you time in the long run).

Chakra is a fairly new distro that has a LiveCD, beautiful graphical installer, tons of excellent programs built in (K3B, Openoffice, Amarok, SMPlayer, Gwenview, Kopete Messenger, yakuake dropdown terminal, the AWESOME Kontact PIM/Email app), its own graphical package manager, and the maturing KDE4.3 desktop.

After some initial hitches with getting everything set up and orienting myself with having to manually do some of the thing which ubuntu automatically did for me, I have to say that I've found a very enjoyable to use desktop. It's fast, fleshed-out, and with compiz fusion very sleek and smooth flowing. With all of the initial stuff out of the way the only problems I'm having is that my max resolution is limited to 1024x768 as well that dolphin sometimes crashes. Yet these are minor problems to me.

This is definitely a worthy distro for KDE-heads and experienced linux users, as all of the apps included here are of the highest quality (except that I had to install firefox manually via the command 'pacman -Syu firefox') but I wouldnt recommend it to everybody, unless you are willing to learn to edit some config files and search google and forums. If it wasnt for the fact that I'm a gamer too, I would probably forget about Windows 7.
 
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